


Anonymous

by CXVII



Category: No Fandom
Genre: Crime, Fighting, Gen, Mystery, Police, Private Investigator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:47:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27444382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CXVII/pseuds/CXVII
Summary: A private investigator attempts to discover the cause behind a gruesome crime scene without being spotted.





	Anonymous

The warm rain fell on the tarmac, plastering Elliott Payne’s hair to his head and running blood into the nearest gutters. Two lifeless forms lay sprawled in front of him - a man, whose age Payne couldn’t estimate because he was face-down to the floor, and a young girl. Payne had been standing for quite a while, sometimes studying the bodies and their surrounding area, sometimes just staring in their general direction during thought. There were no wounds or cuts other than obvious ones caused by the impact, but there were bruises in other places that could have, in all fairness, come from something entirely unrelated. Boston Police Department cars, ambulances and his own Private Investigation firm had men and women scattered around the melancholy crime scene, analysing things and doing their best not to think of what lay before them.

Payne’s eyes slowly panned the front of the building, coming to rest on the balcony with CSI workers teeming on it. Seventeen floors up. Quite a fall for one man, but what didn’t add up was why his daughter lay beside him. The analysts suspected a simple murder/suicide. The only evidence of this, aside from the relative certainty that the girl didn’t jump of her own volition, was the fact that neighbours heard a high pitched scream around the time of the jump. Presumably the girl as she was carried over, says the PD. Payne had a hunch that it was something to the contrary. He glanced around to make sure he wasn’t being watched too closely, and strode inside the building.

There seemed to be law enforcement staff everywhere he went. Workers with blue uniforms and “BPD” emblazoned across their backs in white spoke with receptionists, staff members, even bellhops. Payne subtly moved to the stairs - the lift was in use by the folks in blue - and made his way up.

As he climbed, he further pondered the crime that had been committed, not an hour ago. There was a third person involved, Payne was sure of this. According to the police chief and the witnesses, nobody had left or entered the apartment between the time of the crime and when the police arrived. The only other way out was - all morbid jokes aside, the balcony. There was only one other explanation.

Payne was a trusted private investigator, recently working under a firm rather than freelance, who was known for having a 100% case-solving rate thus far. He had ensured this record by putting parameters in place for those who hired him - partly to keep his odds of maintaining his record reasonable, and partly to make pricing easier. Most of what made his success rate so constant was his ability to think outside of what was happening, to look beyond the circumstances, the grieving family and the current evidence, and see a set of probabilities off which to begin working. His objectivity was compromised this time, however. He had been married with one daughter of his own. He had lost his wife in an accident with a drunk driver ten years ago, and lost his daughter much more recently. He wasn’t sure which of the PD’s two possible outcomes angered him more; the one where a man took his daughter with him, or the one where someone killed a man and his daughter for reasons he was yet to find out.

Payne eventually reached the seventeenth floor and slipped inside without objection, presumably because those who were working there knew who he was and what he was there to do. He scanned the crime scene from where he stood and assessed the situation without approaching anyone who appeared overly busy. People only seemed to be conducting CSI work on the parts of the apartment that were obvious signs of evidence, and nobody was going near the rest of the place. The most pressing thought for Payne was that the killer hadn’t been caught - either because the killer was the father or because the killer was still in the apartment. In an attempt to rule out the latter possibility he began to look around the apartment.

The flat was a tidy affair - two bedrooms, a lone bathroom and a living room with one tiled corner for a kitchen consisting of a sink and an oven alongside numerous cupboards. One aggressively colourful bedroom, obviously that of the young girl, was completely deserted. At least the father’s room was being checked for some way to identify the man; this room was completely deserted of any workers. Something felt awry to Payne, something that stopped him from just turning on his heels once he saw it was empty. Faint noises, sensed more than heard due to the muted din of the sitting room next door, caused his head to turn. The door of the wardrobe shifted slightly, almost as though it was going to swing open and changed its mind. Payne thought to alert someone in the next room, but acted impulsively and stood to the side of the wardrobe before swinging the door open abruptly. He heard a scramble and a click, and then silence for a moment before the sound of scuffling as a man warily clambered out from behind the hanging clothes. He glanced around his field of view for the source of the noise with a silenced pistol pointed at eye level.

Payne quelled an urge to swing a punch at the killer, and instead whispered “Oi, this way.”

The man whipped around and fired three shots at nearly point-blank range. Somehow, not one landed. “Scared?” Payne asked. The attacker was seemingly frozen with numerous emotions, but the most prominent must have been fear because of the way the gun that was pointed at Payne’s head was shaking so violently. “Should be,” was all Payne said before striding towards the killer.

“You-” he managed to stutter.

“Me.”

“How-”

“I was in the area, thought I’d stop by, maybe try and catch this excuse for a man that killed an entire bloody family.

The man obviously knew he was done for once he saw the P.I. on the scene of the crime, and his fight-or-flight instincts kicked in. He began throwing several adrenaline-fueled punches at Payne, all obviously telegraphed and all easily dodged. You didn’t get where Payne was in the business he was in without knowing how to defend yourself, but what he was doing was more along the lines of toying with the man. Driving him further and further from a calm mind, descending into panic. He got words out between ducks and weaves.

“Why them?” Payne prompted as he ducked.

“Do you know how old that girl was? She was nine. Nine years old.” Sidestep.

“They weren’t doing particularly well, either, from the looks of it. The man couldn’t be identified at first, so he’s no millionaire. Did you just feel like ruining a family?” Bob and weave.

“You’d think if you could kill two people you could throw a punch.” He laughed as he hopped back from a jab.

Payne and the killer wove their way around the relatively large bedroom, Payne’s ease completely contrasted against the attacker’s frenzy.

“Laughable.”

“Pathetic.”

“You’re caught now. No amount of amateur Haymakers is changing that.”

“Give. Up.”

The man shouted with rage and shot at Payne, attempting a rugby tackle. They barged through the door of the bedroom, into the living room teeming with police workers - or at least, the killer had thought it was “they”. Payne was nowhere to be seen to him as he lay sprawled on the wooden floor surrounded by people in blue jumpsuits. However, he must have been close, as the killer heard one final insult from him as he was arrested.

“Idiot.”

The following morning, people huddled in front of televisions as morning frost crawled across the pavement, and listened to a news report of the previous night:

“Scottish P.I. Elliott Payne and his nine-year-old daughter Chloe were found dead at the base of their apartment building after falling seventeen floors from his balcony. While it was initially considered a suicide-murder, a man was discovered inside Payne’s apartment who attempted to escape after being detected. He was arrested and has confessed to the crime, but insisted that Elliott had survived. He will face life in prison without parole after pleading insanity. In related news, policemen from Boston PD have gathered…”


End file.
